113825 - decide on a "rule" for when we use more/fewer vs tabs

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, defect)

Description

[Kathleen :Brade]

Lately some of us have been going back and forth on when to use a more/fewer
control as opposed to having tabs.  Rather than just blindly changing much of
our UI, I'd like to see us develop a rationale for why we should use each one
and then changes can be made according to those guidelines.

Comment 1

[Charles Manske]

When the number of widgets required is very large, i.e., when there are lots
of attributes to set in a Property dialog, we must try to reduce the size.
We currently have two models: 1) An expanded section triggered by a button 
("More / Fewer"), or 2) using Tabbed panels
My opinion for criteria to consider when choosing between these modes:
Expanded Dialog using More/Fewer:
1. When the information in the expanded section is very closely related to 
that in the primary section (what shows when dialog is collapsed), then I think 
the "More/Fewer" is better for supporting the extra dialog widgets. The Link 
Properties dialog is a good example of this: The expanded section gives more 
options to select the Link Location by letting user select from lists of Headings
and Named Anchors in the document. When an item is selected, the result is placed
in the Link Location dialog. Thus putting the expanded widgets in a separate Tab
panel does not seem a good solution.
2. When the extra widgets are clearly intended for more advanced users only,
putting them in an expanded section is a good solution since the advanced user
can leave the dialog in the expanded state for quicker access to the advanced 
features during successive uses. An example of this is the Publish dialog, 
which will have UI to select which files to publish with an HTML document in
an expanded section (the expanded section isn't implement as of this date.)
Tabbed Dialog:
1. Tab panels are best for closely-related elements handled in the same dialog,
such as the Table dialog, which has a panel for Table and one for Cell 
properties.
2. When property attributes are not clearly just for advanced users, and those
attributes are not closely tied as I described above for the Link Dialog, we 
should consider the tabbed model. That is not to say that the expanded model is
necessarily bad in this case, but I think the tabbed model is at least an equal
candidate. This argument may be applied to the Image dialog, which currently 
uses an expanded model to reveal other attributes on the Image element.
3. The total size of the dialog must be considered when using the expanded model.
If it is too big, we must consider if tabbed panels can be used to reduce the 
size. This issue has come up in desiging the UI for inserting form elements
(bug 45495), for an <input type="image"> element. In this case, just about all
of the image attributes need to be available as well as the widgets for 
input-specific attributes.

Enough for now. More later after getting other opinions.

Comment 2

[Charles Manske]

No other opinions? Changing milestone

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Was this resolved by accident? Reopening

Comment 4

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420